Carbon Slowly Turning: Ingrid Pollard at MK Gallery
In May the Paul Mellon crew went back to MK Gallery for a conference, but with a very different vibe to Laura Knight. This time we were celebrating Ingrid Pollard, on the occasion of her Turner Prize nominated exhibition Carbon Slowly Turning. For once I carved out time to properly check out the show [outstanding of course]. The real challenge for this event, is that Ingrid is very much a living, practicing, participating artist. We were lucky enough to get to work alongside Ingrid and curator Gilane Tawadros (then CEO of DACS, now Director of Whitechapel) to build a truly exciting, generative programme - one that produced living, practising, participative conversations and provocations and not one that fixed a certain ‘dead’ history of Ingrid’s active and ongoing practice.
As usual, I leave the content to the academic, this time a fantastic foursome of PMC’s Sarah Turner and Sria Chatterjee with MK Gallery’s Anthony Spira and Fay Blanchard. The first session saw two presentations by Evan Ifekoya and Richard Hylton considering Deep Time: Art, Writing and History in relation to their and Ingrid’s work. After lunch two long-standing colleagues of Ingrid’s, Liz Wells and Ella Mills spoke of Matter and Materials in her body of work, followed by a fascinating double-hander between Sheena Calvert and Ajamu X speaking about artists books, particularly the exhibition catalogue.
The assembled audience agreed that the final discussion stole the show. Ingrid herself took to the stage alongside lifelong friend and collaborator, poet Jackie Kay. Together they discussed A Life in Protest under a slideshow of photo’s taken together over the years fighting for both social justice and for art. Jackie gifted the audience with a reading of select poems for the grande finale, finishing with a new work, also called A Life in Protest, dedicated to Ingrid.
It was a day not to be forgotten and I was so glad that I got the chance to be there, and that MK Gallery ops legend Nikki Braithwaite basically managed the whole thing so I can really enjoy the presentations. Thanks too to Luke Perry for impeccable handling of live-stream including some very snazzy hybrid panels and to Dani Convey for once again being my right-hand woman.